the new Moroccan regime’s impending rise. Because he addresses his speech
to “friends” and “lordings” in the audience, it also breaks the frame of the dra-
matic illusion, momentarily undoing the history that is Alcazar( 5. 1. 134 , 136 ).
Ironically too, with “the story of [his] life” told, as Stukeley prepares to die “in
that bed of honour” “where brave Sebastian’s corse doth lie,” he expresses the
hope that “thy [i.e., his] “country” will “kindly ring thy [i.e., his] knell”
( 5. 1. 176 – 78 ). In thus reclaiming his English roots, he wrests himself from the
global scene—from Africa’s “desert fields” and “barbarous Moors” (as well as
from the “proud malicious dogs of Italy”)—that embeds him ( 5. 1. 123 , 126 ),
and puts closure on his part, and Sebastian’s, with a discordant note of hard-
core national bias.
***Although the “careless Christian prince” of Portugal has imagined that he,
with Stukeley in tow, could write Portugal’s name over Morocco (not to men-
tion, literally over parts of Spain and figuratively over England), in the end it
is neither Sebastian nor Stukeley but the new Moroccan regime that gets the
final say ( 3. 2. 16 ). For ultimately in Alcazar, it is not Portugal’s or England’s
history that frames Barbary’s, but Barbary’s that frames Portugal’s and En-
gland’s. The Presenter looks ever forward to that moment of tragic recogni-
tion and release when Sebastian will realize that he has been duped by the
“false-hearted Mahamet” and when someone (it will be Muly Mahamet Seth)
will take revenge on Muly, predictably too late to save Sebastian. Sebastian’s
moment of truth indeed comes on the fields of Alcazar, where he finally is able
to “see [his] oversight,” to realize the “treachery” of the “false-hearted Ma-
hamet,” to remember warnings he tragically ignored “to beware / A face so full
of fraud and villainy” ( 5. 1. 67 – 70 ). However much the Presenter tries to re-
deem the Portuguese crusader and make Alcazar’s story his, the potential
catharsis of this moment is quickly diminished by the displacement of Sebas-
tian’s death (which happens offstage) and of his body (which is lost!) as well
as by a disjunctive shift in focus to Muly, who retreats once again into the
vengeful solipsism that has already proven politically and dramatically deadly.
His defeat imminent, the Moor can only think to retire again to “some un-
couth walk” where he can “curse [his] fill,” blaming fate, “my stars, my dam,
my planets, and my nurse” ( 5. 1. 76 – 77 ). In lines that Shakespeare will echo in
Richard III( 1592 – 93 ), Muly stands before the river that will drown him and
calls for “a horse, a horse, villain, a horse!” so that he can “take the river
Enter Barbary 41